Jonathan Fineberg – The Postman Did It – Children’s Art and the Avant-garde

which are also influenced by the simplified vocabulary of child art
(in combination with many other important sources).
However, complex the genesis of the large figure compositions
of Matisse before World War I, he did title his retrospective glance
back over his career, “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child,” and
remarked that “the artist...has to look at everything as though he
saw it for the first time: he has to look at life as he did when he was
a child and if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an
original, that is, a personal way.” 58
When Picasso and Matisse decided to trade paintings in 1907 it
was the Portrait of Marguerite that Picasso selected, later explaining:
At the time people thought I had deliberately chosen
a bad example of Matisse’s work out of malice. This is
quite untrue. I thought it a key picture then, and still
do. Critics are always talking about this and that influence
on Matisse’s work. Well, the influence on Matisse
when he painted this work was his children, who had
just started to draw. Their naïve drawings fascinated
him and completely changed his style. Nobody realizes
this, and yet it’s one of the keys to Matisse. 59
Fig. 10
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